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Magic & Manners

It is a truth universally accepted that well-bred members of Society are not beleaguered with magic.

For Elsabeth Dover and her sisters, that truth means living in a perpetual state of caution, never using their sorcerous gifts in public...

Atlantis Fallen

Book 1 of the Heartstrike Chronicles

A city hidden for five thousand years.

A man so ancient his early history is lost to time.

A woman who has nothing to lose...

Urban Shaman

Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt.
No worries. No pressure. Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams.
And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead bodyâbut she's just come across her second in three days.
It's been a bitch of a week.
And it isn't over yet.

Stone's Throe

JUSTICE WILL BE DONE!
Some girls languish under the weight of a broken heart, but not Amelia Stone. After a youthful encounter with the villain known as le Monstre aux Yeux Verts, Amelia is left with regrets - and a stalwart determination to right the wrongs of the world.

Bewitching Benedict

Benedict Fairburn does not quite need his ailing great-aunt's fortune, especially since he'll have to marry to get it. His family, however, thinks otherwise - as do many of the eligible ladies in London - and the pressure is mounting. An embarrassment of attentions fill Benny's time, but the young lady he prefers roundly dislikes him...

lifestyle changes

A while ago I talked about living in and fitting into Ireland, and the attendant difficulties therein. We’ve been trying to come up with solutions, and have made at least one decision that we think is going to help quite a bit: we’re moving to a much less expensive town (*much* less expensive: we’re talking very literally nearly twice the house for half the cost). We’ve rented a house in Longford, the town my parents moved to recently (in fact, we’ll be five doors down from them). We’ll be gone from Cork by the end of the month. In fact, I’ll probably be gone from Cork by next Sunday, because I’m going to basically abandon Ted to deal with all the moving stuff and come up here to hide in an empty house with no internet connection and work very hard on my book.

More behind the cut.

The general reaction of the Irish to Longford seems to be to take the piss about it, though Kate remembered having visited and realized it was a nice town, so changed her piss-taking to the Taoiseach who’d been from here and who is presumably responsible for many of the town’s nice features. :) It is, I admit, a bit in the middle of nowhere, though really it’s less than 2 hours by train from Dublin. If the trains ran later it’d be awesome, but they don’t. Oh well.

However, despite being sort of in the middle of nowhere, it’s got everything Ted and I might want to do (we even came across a Warhammer group advertisement, and though we don’t play Warhammer, it bodes well for finding a gaming group. If we fail to find a gaming group, well, Dublin’s 2 hours away, and possibly we can arrange a monthly or bi-weekly thing on a weekend there.). There’s a Masters swim club, there’s a karate club, there’s a *scuba club*, for heaven’s sake, who would ever imagine a scuba club in the midst of a land-locked county? but there it is. There are camera clubs and writers groups and a gym and yoga and pilates and a canal they’re refurbishing, there’s golfing, there’s … just sort of everything we might want to do, and we will literally be able to pay all our living expenses with the same amount of money we were paying for rent in Cork.

I’m sad to leave Cork. I really like it. On the other hand, I’d also really like to be able to *afford* to go to Paris this year. And that’s basically the kind of thing we’re looking at: scraping by in Cork, or potentially actually being able to enjoy living in Ireland, finally *go* to the continent, travel around *Ireland*, for that matter, and it’d be nice to be able to get into Dublin a little quicker and see my sister and her family more regularly. So one more more. Which is what we said when we moved into Cork city, but we were wrong. I hope to hell we’re not wrong this time.

Actually, I don’t think we are. I’m not especially good at getting out and meeting people, but there are a *lot* of things here that have potential, and Ted’s actually *good* at getting out, if he doesn’t work evenings. It’s also inexpensive enough that if Ted decides he’s going to pursue writing more enthusiastically, we can live on my paycheck. That’s a huge bonus. So, yeah. Major lifestyle changes coming our way.

During which, of course, I have to write a book. @.@ :)

In other news, boy. It’s been more than half a million words, 7 books worth of writing, since I last wrote Joanne Walker. She’s changed a lot more than I thought she had when I wrote the proposal for this book two years ago. I’m really glad now for the time away from her, because it’ll shape the next three books in a way that not having a break wouldn’t have, but it does mean I’m rewriting more of the first three chapters than I thought I was going to. I’m enjoying it quite a lot, and I think getting past the rewrites and into the meat of the book is going to be fun.

Bahah. I’ve just gotten permission to beef up my Subterranean Press short story a bit. That’ll give me more room to lodge it firmly in the Old Races universe, and to develop a couple things I left more or less untouched ’cause of wordcount restraints. Ooh, this makes me very happy.

Yeah, okay. Not a bad day, I’d say. Back to work on CB now. It’d be nice to get the first chapter revised by this evening.

miles to Minas Tirith: 475ytd kilometers swum: 1.5music: the very silly birthday bag song

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1 Comment

Well congrats on finding more for less. I think that the “quality of living” choice is always a hard one but I’ve rarely found anyone that regretted it.

And I think the time was probably good for Joanne. She had(has?) a lot of stuff to think about and deal with.. at least in my opinion, and time helps with that. That being said, I can’t wait to read the next 3 books!

Also, as an FYI, still no TQB on Audible :/, which is fine, I bought the book in print, but I have a collection of you on audio and I’d like to continue it. Audible has been slack about a couple of series lately though, so it’s most likely them, not anything to do with you.